This summer has brought a lot of changes, and I am not a person who adjusts well to changes.
Some of these changes I can’t write about because they aren’t my changes to talk about. One of them I can’t talk about because it hasn’t been made public in our area yet.
I can say that the changes and adjustments have involved employment situations, my aging parents’ health, and my own health.
Some of them are serious and scary, but I’m hopeful that my own health issues are something I can deal with by making even more adjustments to my diet and supplements.
One thing I do know with my health so far is that I do have some autoimmune issues going on. Doctors just aren’t sure which issues yet.
As for my parents, they are getting older and struggling with some issues, including whether they want to stay in their house or not. Their health and age is a big part of that decision.
As Summer draws to an end, though, I am looking forward to some cozy days this fall. I enjoy the weather when it is cooler. I function better physically and mentally on cooler days. I don’t function great on super cold days unless I am inside under a blanket with my warm rice packs.
I’m actually looking forward to those days. I get more writing done for my books in the fall and winter, which is probably why book four of the Gladwynn Grant Mysteries is going so slow.
In the Summer I feel like I have to be busy and do things because “it’s nice out”. This Summer whatever autoimmune condition I had got worse, though, so I couldn’t do that as much as I wanted. The symptoms that go so bad were mainly the exhaustion and achy legs, the dizziness and the anxiety. I learned I have to put more salt on things, drink electrolyte drinks, and simply eat more regular meals. I have this tendency to eat a protein but not add carbs or veggies to it. By the afternoon I feel like a wet noodle.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve cut out gluten, reduced sugar, and added more vegetables, though I’m still not at the level of veggies I should be at.
I’m reaching for grapes or apples instead of chocolate, but still have a square or two of the Aldi brand chocolate, which tastes so much better to me than most of our American brands. I’m taking four supplements — Iron (with B12, b6, and vitamin c), garlic, probiotics, and an elderberry gummy with elderberry, vitamin D, and vitamin C.
I’m noticing small changes. I still don’t have a ton of energy, but I do have a little bit more. My weak legs aren’t quite as weak on some days. My achy legs are a bit less achy. The anxiety was still there and intense at the beginning of this week but by mid-week it had actually faded some and on Thursday when I had a doctor appointment to discuss all his it had actually gone away. Praise the Lord!
Even without knowing what autoimmune issue I have (pretty sure it is thyroid related since I already have hypothyroidism), the diet change is helping immensely.
Shifting gears a little….
Have you ever watched those reunion videos with mothers hugging their sons or grandparents with their grandchildren after not seeing them for a long time? It’s always a surprise and everyone is crying and then I’m crying.
Sometimes I’m crying because it is so sweet and sometimes I am crying because I think about how wonderful it would be to hug my grandmothers or aunts again.
I think about how wonderful that feeling must be for those people and how wonderful it would be to feel the same. I know why the relatives of the soldiers who return are crying so hard. They thought that soldier might not return alive. They don’t say it out loud, but it is tucked there in the back of their mind and then when they are finally holding them in their arms it all breaks loose. They aren’t injured. They aren’t dead. They are here in their arms and all those worries and fears just rush out in that moment.
Shifting gears again…
Did I mention that the weather is cold right now?
Like, for instance, while I am working on this post at 11:30 in the morning it is 61 degrees out! In August!
I know that summer weather isn’t done with us yet, though. Pennsylvania has been known to drop temps in the 80s on us right up until October and sometimes into October so we are going to enjoy these nice cooler temps but not plan on them staying.
I can tell you, though, I am already gearing up for hot cocoa, apple cider, leaves crunching under my feet after they’ve fallen off the trees. The leaves are actually already falling but they are just brown and dead, which makes me nervous that we won’t have pretty fall foliage. We will just have to wait and see but even without it we can have all the fall feelings.
I’m definitely an autumn person. I love the chill in the air, the smell of the leaves, hayrides (or watching others go on them at least), reading books under a blanket on the front porch while colorful leaves fall around me.
I’m not a fan of pumpkin spice anything or Halloween, however. I don’t hate either but they aren’t what I look forward to most. However, I might actually try something with pumpkin spice this year just for fun.
This next week Little Miss and I will be doing school every day after Monday, so while we were easing into it before we are fully immersing ourselves this week.
We are studying Paleontology for science for the first half of the year. In English, we are reading The Good Master and will be tackling parts of speech and sentence diagramming.
In History, we are reading about the early days of our country, but later will begin moving into some more modern history through historical fiction. I’m not sure which book we are reading first but there is a list of them that I am looking forward to.
Math is being studied through CTC Math, an online program out of Australia, for now. Art is going to be fun this year since I purchased Little Miss a huge art set with all types of paint and canvases. I hope we will be able to take a few online classes.
It looks like we might not be joining a co-op this year since the co-op that was local might have dissolved, but I am still looking into that and 4-H classes.
How have you been doing? Have you done anything exciting to finish out your summer if you are in the northern hemisphere? If you are in the southern hemisphere, are you planning anything exciting for your spring?
Let me know in the comments. I love catching up with you all.
This week’s prompt was Non-bookish Freebie (The sky is the limit here. Make a top ten list on any topic of your choosing, bookish or not!)
So I decided to share ten movies I think all of you should watch at some point in your lives, but preferably right now. I have watched all of them and two of them are my favorites. Guess which two in the comments for fun!
The Third Man (1949)
Set in postwar Vienna, Austria, “The Third Man” stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Westerns, who arrives penniless as a guest of his childhood chum Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to find him dead. Martins develops a conspiracy theory after learning of a “third man” present at the time of Harry’s death, running into interference from British officer Maj. Calloway (Trevor Howard) and falling head-over-heels for Harry’s grief-stricken lover, Anna (Alida Valli).
A swank family of swindlers that includes father “Sahib,” (Roland Young), wife Marmy, son Richard (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and daughter George-Anne (Janet Gaynor), fall upon hard times in France and return home to London destitute. The family befriends a wealthy spinster, Miss Ellen Fortune, and after they rescue her when their train crashes, she invites them to stay with her. Initially planning to prey on Miss Ellen, the family is swayed by her goodness and begins to change in shocking ways.
3. The Quiet Man (1952)
Boxer Sean Thornton leaves America and returns to his native Ireland, hoping to buy his family’s homestead and live in peace. In doing so, he runs afoul of Will Danaher, who long coveted the property. Spitefully, Will objects when his fiery sister, Mary Kate, begins a romance with Sean, and refuses to hand over her dowry. Mary Kate refuses to consummate the marriage until Sean retrieves the money.
Near the end of the Korean War, a platoon of U.S. soldiers is captured by communists and brainwashed. Following the war, the platoon is returned home, and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is lauded as a hero by the rest of his platoon. However, the platoon commander, Captain Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), finds himself plagued by strange nightmares and, together with fellow soldier Allen Melvin (James Edwards), races to uncover a terrible plot.
5. The Thin Man (1934)
The story of a retired detective who, while spending much of his time managing his wife’s considerable fortune and consuming quantities of alcohol, is asked to follow the trail of a missing inventor. Although reluctant to interrupt his holiday in Manhattan, he is persuaded to investigate by his wife’s craving for adventure, and together they embark upon a case that leads to the disclosure of deception and murder.
Harried paleontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant) has to make a good impression on society matron Mrs. Random (May Robson), who is considering donating one million dollars to his museum. On the day before his wedding, Huxley meets Mrs. Random’s high-spirited young niece, Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a madcap adventuress who immediately falls for the straitlaced scientist. The ever-growing chaos — including a missing dinosaur bone and a pet leopard — threatens to swallow him whole.
Charming scoundrel Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) woos wealthy but plain Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine), who runs away with him despite the warnings of her disapproving father (Cedric Hardwicke). After their marriage, Johnnie’s risky financial ventures cause Lina to suspect he’s becoming involved in unscrupulous dealings. When his dear friend and business partner, Beaky (Nigel Bruce), dies under suspicious circumstances on a business trip, she fears her husband might kill her for her inheritance.
8. Singing in the Rain (1952)
When the transition is being made from silent films to `talkies’, everyone has trouble adapting. Don and Lina have been cast repeatedly as a romantic couple, but when their latest film is remade into a musical, only Don has the voice for the new singing part. After a lot of practise with a diction coach, Lina still sounds terrible, and Kathy, a bright young aspiring actress, is hired to record over her voice.
After the death of her famous opera-singing aunt, Paula (Ingrid Bergman) is sent to study in Italy to become a great opera singer as well. While there, she falls in love with the charming Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer). The two return to London, and Paula begins to notice strange goings-on: missing pictures, strange footsteps in the night and gaslights that dim without being touched. As she fights to retain her sanity, her new husband’s intentions come into question.
10. The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (1947)
Artist playboy Dickie Nugent (Cary Grant) appears before beautiful judge Margaret Turner (Myrna Loy) for fighting at a nightclub, and charms her into dismissing the charge. That same day, Dickie happens to lecture at a high school, where Margaret’s teenage sister, Susan (Shirley Temple), falls head-over-heels for him. Things get complicated when Susan sneaks away and is found in Dickie’s apartment, and downright zany when he is court ordered to date the teen as a way of easing her attraction.
Have you ever seen any of these movies? What did you think?
To find more movie suggestions or “reviews” click HERE.
Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.
You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
Last week I finished the book The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.
I enjoyed the book so much that I looked forward to a couple chapters each night before bed just like I used to read books before there were all these devices and social media sites and everything else to distract me. Losing myself in the story completely forgetting about everything around me going on was exactly what I needed. Yes, the book could be a bit dramatic at times, but, come on, it was written in 1905!
I loved the hardcover copy I found too. It was printed about 30 years ago by Reader’s Digest but I love how it had a vintage feel to it.
Even though I’ve seen the 1982 TV serial movie with Jane Seymour, Anthony Andrews, and Ian McKellen and therefore knew the story, I still wanted to read the book because I wanted to see if the book was different or the same.
The baroness (yes, she actually was one) wrote the play, The Scarlet Pimpernel, before she wrote the book. There are also several sequels to the book, and some don’t focus on the same characters.
First, a little description of the book and movie for those who might not be familiar with it.
Armed with only his wits and his cunning, one man recklessly defies the French revolutionaries and rescues scores of innocent men, women, and children from the deadly guillotine. His friends and foes know him only as the Scarlet Pimpernel. But the ruthless French agent Chauvelin is sworn to discover his identity and to hunt him down.
I first watched the movie version of The Scarlet Pimpernel years ago and then watched it again about a month ago. It was a CBS production with all British actors that ran three hours, maybe over a couple of nights, but I’m not sure.
After I watched the movie, I remembered I had found a hardcopy of the book by Baroness Orczy last year at a used book sale.
I couldn’t figure out how to write this without giving spoilers so … there will be spoilers. You have been warned.
First, let’s go to the book which begins with a French family being rescued from the guillotine. They’ve been brought to an inn in England by the band of men who work with The Scarlet Pimpernel. They’re exhausted but grateful. The mother in the family, referred to by the author as The Comtesse is also worried because her husband has remained in France and could be next to have his head cut off. While talking about who is who in England that she will be able to rub elbows with now that she is there, the name Lady Blakeny, formerly known as Marguerite St. Just comes up and the Comtesse balks. She doesn’t want to meet that woman because that woman turned in the Marquis de St. Cyr to the revolutionists and he and his entire family were guillotined.
The men in the inn are taken aback by this charge but don’t seem surprised the woman says it. What they are nervous about is that Lady Blakeny is currently on her way to the inn with her husband Sir Percy Blakeny, who is known as a lazy “fop”. He’s rich and simply putters his days away by hobnobbing with the Prince of Wales and other elites. He’s also terribly obnoxious. He met his wife in France and brought her back with him to live in England.
Unfortunately, the Comtesse sees Lady Blakeny and lets the woman know she wants nothing to do with her because of how she turned in the de St. Cyr family.
Lady Blakeny is confused by the charge and laughs it off.
It isn’t long before we learn that Marguerite did turn the family in but not on purpose. She dropped a hint that the Marquis was a traitor after the Marquis beat her brother Armand St. Just because he was in love with the Marquis’s daughter. She told her husband shortly after they were married and had returned to England what happened and it was after that he became very cold toward her and barely spoke to her in private, making their marriage more of a show than anything else.
The main plot of the book is a romantic one involving the misunderstandings between Marguerite and her husband.
Early on, Marguerite is approached by Citizen Chauvelin, an agent of the revolutionists in France, and he requests her to spy on those she associates with in England to see if she can find out who The Scarlet Pimpernel is.
The revolutionists want him stopped so he can no longer smuggle out aristocrats that the revolutionists want to murder.
Marguerite refuses but later in the book Chauvelin and his men find a letter that reveals her brother Armand is involved with The Scarlet Pimpernel and his men. In fact, Armand is on his way to France to set up arrangements to save another aristocrat family.
Chauvelin blackmails her, forcing her to help find out The Scarlet Pimpernel’s identity or he will have Armand killed.
She and Armand are very close because they lost their parents, and he helped to raise her so she reluctantly agrees to this plan.
Secretly Marguerite admires The Scarlet Pimpernel and his daring escapades to rescue aristocrats who are about to be killed. She harbors a ton of guilt for what happened to the Marquis and wants others to be rescued. Despite not wanting to stop The Scarlet Pimpernel, she agrees to spy in her husband’s circle of friends to see if she can learn anything about The Pimpernel’s identity, simply so Armand is not killed.
She does learn something at a future ball that the Prince of Wales is attending when she finds out that The Scarlet Pimpernel will be meeting with his men in the supper room at 1 a.m. that night. She tells Chauvelin this but when Chauvelin goes to wait all he finds is lazy, silly Sir Percy asleep on the couch.
Now in the book, Marguerite goes back to her home with Sir Percy and confronts him over how he’s been treating her. Sir Percy fights his emotions because he truly loves her despite what she did in France and believes it must have been a misunderstanding.
There is one big reason Sir Percy can’t show his love to her though. He can’t trust her and he needs to trust her because SPOILER ALERT!!!! Do not read further if you don’t want to know the truth ——
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Sir Percy is actually The Scarlet Pimpernel!!! WHAT?! Now, when we watch the movie, we already know this and it makes the sexual tension even more heightened between Marguerite (Seymour) and Sir Percy (Andrews), especially after the scene where Chauvelin (McKellen) thinks he’s going to find The Pimpernel but instead only finds Sir Percy.
In the movie Marguerite runs to the dining room instead of home. The room is dark and she hears someone behind her, but she doesn’t turn around. She assumes it must be The Pimpernel so she tells him that Chauvelin is after him and trying to trap him.
This warning lets Sir Percy know that Marguerite truly supports the mission of The Scarlet Pimpernel and his band and his heart begins to melt. He steps forward, almost puts his hand on her shoulder, clearly wants to kiss her neck, but he steps back again. He doesn’t tell her who he is, preferring to protect her from any interrogation from Chauvelin.
In the book, Marguerite figures out who Sir Percy is after he leaves for France and the daughter of a man who could be killed says she heard that The Scarlet Pimpernel had left that very morning to rescue her father.
I feel like the TV movie actually fleshed some things out a bit better and added another layer which would have made the book even better.
In the movie, we see more of Lady and Sir Percy’s romance and then their marriage about halfway through. The coldness comes when Sir Percy finds out her involvement in the Marquis’s murder from someone else at their wedding reception. The person tells Sir Percy that her name was on the warrant for the Marquis’s arrest, but really we viewers know that it it is the villain Chauvelin who put her name on the arrest warrant.
Another difference between the book and the movie is that in the movie there is an underlying story of the Scarlet Pimpernel and his men trying to rescue Prince Louise XVII before he is killed in the tower, which is what happened in real life. Their goal is to smuggle the prince out of France to England and keep him there until he is older and can come back to France and take over the throne again.
There is no mention of the prince in the book and that would have been a fun layer to add.
In both the book and the movie, Marguerite sets off to rescue Percy when she learns who he is. She learns who he is the same way in the book and the movie — she runs into Percy’s office and notices there are pimpernels along the molding of the room and in other places, which helps her to put the pieces together. In the movie, though, Sir Percy leaves a note for her in his office/study, which indicates he hoped she’d figure it out. I didn’t get that in the book, but maybe I just missed that part.
Marguerite can’t bear the thought of Percy being captured and killed by Chauvelin. I liked that she went off to rescue him, which she sort of did in the movie but not in the same way.
In the book she was sneaking around and risking her life much more than she did in the movie.
I liked the show own in the movie, which didn’t happen in the book. In the book Sir Percy uses the many disguises he used to help smuggle aristocrats out to disguise himself and keep him from being discovered by Chauvelin. He disguises himself as a Jew, which seems to be a popular thing for the English to do back then. Jews were always looked down on as disgusting and dirty at that time so they were easily overlooked.
Disguised as a Jew, Percy tells Chauvelin he saw the man that might be the Scarlet Pimpernel and leads him on a wild goose chase so that his men have enough time to escae to Sir Percy’s ship.
Chauvelin believes The Scarlet Pimpernel is leaving on his ship so he leaves a bruised and beat up Marguerite behind with the bruised and beat up Jew. Of course, Sir Percy reveals himself to Marguerite once Chauvelin and his men are gone and they have a romantic reunion.
In the movie, Sir Percy is captured when Armand goes back to his lover to rescue her. In the book Armand didn’t have a lover to go back to. Chauvelin says he will only release Sir Percy if he gives the prince back, so Sir Percy leads him to a castle near the ocean. By then, though, the prince has been released.
Chauvelin is pissed off and sends Sir Percy out to be shot. Unfortunately for him, Sir Percy has managed to switch Chauvelin’s men for his own and that means Sir Percy returns to the castle unscathed, has a dual with Chauvelin and wins, and then they leave Chauvelin stranded at the castle before escaping on Sir Percy’s ship to England.
The ending to the movie was a lot more exciting to me with that added dual. I’m sure it was easier to have a dual than having to explain why the French thought Jews were so gross that they would have ignored Sir Percy who was dressed up as one. Not to mention the stereotypical description of Sir Percy’s makeup, etc. would have been — well…insensitive to say the least.
The bottom line is that while I loved the book, I also loved that the movie flushed the book out even more for me.
I do hope to read the other books in the series, even if I don’t get my satisfaction of the full story of Sir Percy and Lady Blakeny.
A bit of trivia/facts about the movie taken from various sources around the web, including articles, interviews, and IMdB:
This movie was produced by London Films and directed by Clive Donner.
Filming took place at various eighteenth century sites in England, including Blenheim Palace, Ragley Hall, Broughton Castle, and Milton Manor; also Lindisfarne.
The subplot with the Dauphin was taken from another one of Orczy’s novels, Eldorado, which was what the screenplay for the 1982 TV adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel was based on.
Timothy Carlton, who played the Count De Beaulieu, is the father of actor Benedict Cumberbatch and ironically, McKellen would appear with Benedict in the Hobbit trilogy – or at least was in the same movies that Benedict did the voice of Smaug for. Seems Timothy felt he’d better change that last name while Benedict knew his first and last name would be an attention getter, I guess.
Jane Seymour sometimes took her infant daughter with her to the set and had never seen the original movie from 1934 starring Leslie Howard, Merle Oberon, and Raymond Massey. (I hope to watch this in the fall or winter and compare it to the TV movie since many sources online say it is still considered the best adaptation. I saw part of it years ago, but do not remember finishing it.).
Julian Fellowes (Prince Regent) also played the Prince Regent (the future George IV) in Sharpe’s Regiment (1996)
London Films hoped that Andrews would one day star in a Scarlet Pimpernel series in the US, but this never occurred.
In his 2006 work Stage Combat Resource Materials: A Selected And Annotated Bibliography, author J. Michael Kirkland referred to the sword fight between Percy and Chauvelin as “nicely staged, if somewhat repetitious … but still entertaining.” Kirkland also observed that the weapons used were in fact German sabres, which were not used during the Napoleonic era. (source Wikipedia).
A little about the Baroness herself summarized from the back of the book:
She was born…get ready for this one! Baroness Emmuska Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josepha Barbara Orczy on Sept. 23 1865 in Tarna-Ors, Hungary. Her father was a notable composer and a nobleman and in 1868 the family was chased from Hungary during a peasant uprising, eventually settling in London when the Baroness was 15. Before that she attended schools in Paris and Brussels. She was once quoted as saying that London was her “spiritual birthplace.”
Emmuska learned to speak English quickly, fell in love with art and writing and eventually married illustrator Montaque Barstow. They had one son.
She and her husband wrote the play about Sir Percy Blakeny in 1903 based on a short story Emmuska had written. The play ran in London. Emmuska wrote the novelization and released it in 1905. The book was a huge success and she went on to write other stories about Sir Percy Blakeny and his friends, but she also wrote more plays, mystery fiction, and adventure romances.
Have you read the book and/or seen the movie of The Scarlet Pimpernel? If so, what did you think of them?
How about the Baroness’s other books – have you read any of them?
I found this movie for free on YouTube, but it is streaming on various other services, including Amazon, Sling TV, Roku, and Apple.
This summer I am watching Angela Lansbury movies for the Summer of Angela.
Up this week was A Life At Stake, another crime noir “B-movie” and another chance for Angela to show her evil side. Honestly, she’s been evil in a lot of the movies I watched with her throughout this summer, which cracks me up since a lot of people associate her with being sweet in kind from things like Murder She Wrote and Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
This movie was not the best I’ve ever seen plot-wise but the dialogue was actually very well written and the sexual tension was something I didn’t expect for a 1954 movie.
The movie is essentially about a man who is very paranoid and thinks everyone is out to get him. Or, as Google describes it: “After an out of work architect accepts a business proposition from a married woman, he soon begins to suspect her motives, and fear for his life.”
Edward Shaw, portrayed by Keith Andes had a business failing and now he’s been approached by a lawyer with the prospect of a new business.
Edward tells the lawyer he really doesn’t really want to get involved. He keeps a $1000 bill framed on his wall to remind him of his failures and encourage him to try again. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a $1,000 bill by the way.
Anyhow, I digress, the lawyer puts him in contact with Doris Hillman (Angela), wife of Gus Hillman (Douglass Dumbrille). Edward goes to Doris’s home and the housekeeper says he needs to call out before he goes to the pool because Doris has been known to swim in the nude. Edward quips back, “That’s okay. I’ve been known to swim in the nude too.”
Doris isn’t naked but she does tell Edward he should have called out. From their first meeting the flirting begins in earnest. Doris even covers herself with a towel but removes the top of her swim suit underneath it because she says it’s uncomfortable.
Eventually they get to business talks and Doris says Gus wants Edward to run the company, buying up property with money Gus will give him and for Doris to sell the property using her past real estate experience.
Edward is agreeable but feels suspicious about it all, especially when Doris says they will need to take an insurance policy out on him for half a mil. He doesn’t, however, seem to feel suspicious about Doris and later that night at home when he gets a call, he asks his land lady if it is a woman calling. It is clear he’s hopeful Doris will be calling soon and about a lot more than business.
Doris does call another day and asks him to meet her a hotel room. From there he’s laying it on heavy, flirting all over the place, but she lets him know she’s not interested. She’s only interested in business. Edward (sort of a horny jerk if you ask me) leaves but later that night Doris pulls up outside his apartment.
She says something flirty and then before we know it, he’s in the car practically shoving his tongue own her throat.
All is going well with their little liaisons and business dealings until Edward meets Doris’s sister, Madge (Claudia Barrett). Madge thinks he’s just lovely and starts hitting on him. She invites him to dinner in front of Doris and Gus and because he doesn’t want Gus to know about his affair with Doris, he agrees.
During dinner Madge drops a bombshell and says that Gus is Doris’s second husband because her first husband died a few years ago in an accident. What’s weird is that Doris and Gus were in a business with him too and when he died Gus and Doris got the insurance money since they’d taken out a policy on each of them for the business.
Edward is incensed. He had a feeling Doris and Gus were up to something and now he knows what it is. They really do want to kill him and get the money for the insurance policy they took out in his name.
He’s still thinking about this when Doris calls and says she wants to show him something.
He reluctantly agrees and she drives him up on a hill. She shows him some property she says will be great for development but when she goes to park, the brake slips and the car keeps rolling. She gets it in park and says she’s going to go get the property owner because he said he would show them around.
After she leaves, though, with Edward sitting in the passenger side, the car starts to roll toward a bank with a long drop and Edward just barely stops it.
That cinches it for him. Doris and Gus are in on this together and they are going to kill him.
I won’t give away the ending but most of the rest of the 70 minute movie (yes, it’s that short) will be Edward waffling back and forth between suspecting the couple and being in love with Doris while Madge is in love with Edward and knows all about the affair. Later she also knows about Edward’s suspicions.
This is a dark movie and it took the path I thought it might but I did think there might be more of a plot twist toward the end. Actually, there did seem to be a bit of a plot twist based on something said by a character right at the end but I wasn’t sure if I was reading too much into it or not.
I will share that I did read Cat’s review (found on her blog Cat’s Wire) before finishing this post up and I have to agree that I did not really connect with or like the main character.
I don’t think I would have cried much if he had been murdered (okay, so I gave a little away here…..he isn’t murdered). He was very unlikable and rude. He wanted to have his little fling with Doris but also keep her and her husband from killing him. He was sort of ruled by his privates to me and it severely affected his judgment. And though there were some good lines in this one – the writing overall was just not very strong.
I’m sure this is just motion blur in the image, but all I can think of when I see Angela’s hand in this photo is that episode of Seinfeld when Jerry dates a woman with “man hands.”
I liked Angela’s performance and thought she succeeded once again in pulling off playing someone evil and making it hard for the viewer to figure out if she was really in love with Edward or not.
I listened to an interview with Angela last week when writing about The Picture of Dorian Gray, and she said she made a lot of not-so-great movies over the years. This may be one of them she was referring to.
The movie was directed by Paul Guilfoyle, for those who care about such things. The film was restored in 2021 and resulted in a few noir crime movie buffs blogging about it.
One of those, Michael Barrett from the site Pop Matters, wrote: “You’d have to know me to understand how unlikely it is that I’d never heard of this picture, but the commentary by scholar Jason A. Ney points out that this film is so obscure, it’s not listed in most noir references, despite the presence of a major star. So this might count as more of a rediscovery than restoration.”
About the acting and plot he writes, “The film runs only 76 minutes, but a bunch of stuff happens at a nice clip, sometimes too quickly for us to analyze how much adds up, with some elements more obvious than others. In a sense, everyone is clumsy and transparent, and that feels reasonably credible. The story mixes common sense (e.g., going to the cops and the insurance company) with devious cupidity and lust amongst tawdry, small-minded people.”
Glenn Erickson on Trailers from Hell wrote: “Filmed in 1954, producer Hank McCune’s A Life at Stake is notable for its fairly competent production and a decent if somewhat thrill-challenged screenplay — and the fact that it stars an actress one wouldn’t think would be associated with an 11-day cheapie thriller. The great Angela Lansbury is the odd star out on a list of creatives that reads like a call sheet for ambitious Hollywood underachievers, all thirsting for the right show to get their career in motion.”
I have to agree with Erickson when he writes: “The movie generates some tension but can’t quite convince us that Ed Shaw is as helpless as presented.”
I enjoyed Erickson’s entire review and background so if you would like to know even more about the film and Angela’s role in it, please check it out.
Some facts and trivia:
“The unusual convertible Doris Hillman (Dame Angela Lansbury) drove was a Kaiser Darrin. Only 435 production Darrins and six prototypes were built. Its entry doors slid on tracks into the front fender wells behind the front wheels, which was patented in 1946, had no side windows and a three-position Landau top. The car’s only criticism by enthusiasts was the front grill, which looked like it “wanted to give you a kiss.” (Source: imdb)
This was an independent feature produced by Hank McCune, who briefly starred in his own free-wheeling TV sitcom, The Hank McCune Show. (source: Pop Matters)
McCune created the story and hired people from his television series, including writer Russ Bender and supporting actor Frank Maxwell. (source: Pop Matters)
The director’s wife, Kathleen Mulqueen, plays Shaw’s mom-like secretary. (source: Pop Matters)
Directly from imbd.com: “In the first scene, Edward Shaw (Keith Andes) roams about his room in the boarding house wearing only form-fitting pajama bottoms and stripped to the waist, giving audiences ample chance to view his impressive musculature from every conceivable angle. In a comic twist, an attorney enters the room, and one of his first lines of dialogue to Edward is “Come now, you’re not the first man to lose his shirt!””
In order to please the Italian music unions, an agreed number of American films had to be re-scored by Italian composers for release in Italy. A bit of irony is that Les Baxter had his original music replaced by Costantino Ferri, Baxter himself would later join AIP and re-score over a dozen movies previously done by Italian composers. (Source: imbd)
When Edward Shaw (Keith Andes) gets into a taxi after leaving his office, in the background, the old Sunset Theatre is seen, which was located on Western Avenue just north of Sunset Boulevard; the double feature shown on the marquee is Da Vinci also Julius Caesar (with Marlon Brando) , which dates the shot as May 1954. The theatre no longer exists. The intersection has been redeveloped.
Left on my Summer of Angela list for August are:
August 22 – I’ve decided to substitute A Long Hot Summer for All Fall Down for a couple reasons — I’ve watched A Long Hot Summer before and it will allow me to admire Paul (Newman) again and I watched a preview for the film and this annoying kid kept calling the main character Barry-Barry and that just seemed super, super annoying. Plus, I’ve heard it is a dark film. I originally wanted to watch it because I’ve never seen a Warren Beatty film (don’t you dare ever remind me of Dick Tracy! Never! Ever! I would like to burn that memory out of my brain with the end of a cigarette! My brother and I walked out of that film and I have never attempted to watch it again and I still have PTSD!). I can always watch another Warren Beatty film instead.
August 29 – Something for Everyone
If you want to read about some of the other movies I watched, you can find them here:
“I made up my mind that I would pop back and do the strong, manly thing by lying low in my flat and telling Jeeves to inform everybody who called that I wasn’t at home.”
The Inimitable Jeeves was my first P.G. Wodehouse book and I enjoyed it so much I’m already reading another one in the Jeeves series.
This book was originally presented as a collection of short stories which appeared in The Strand magazine in the U.K. The stories were later compiled into a novel. The first collection of short stories was Carry On, Jeeves, which I am reading now.
A little background on this series of short stories/books first.
Bertie Wooster is a “English gentleman” who is considered one of the “idle rich.” He doesn’t have a job. He mainly lives off his rich aunt Agatha and, probably, a trust fund.
Jeeves is Bertie’s valet or male attendant, if you don’t know what valet means. I wasn’t totally sure of the meaning of the word “valet” myself when I first heard the term years ago.
Jeeves gets Bertie out of the many predicaments Bertie gets himself into by being too nice or too arrogant by thinking he can fix a situation. In this book Bertie gets himself in trouble in a variety of ways, including helping his old school chum Bingo who is in love with a new woman every other month.
He also has to try to dodge his Aunt Agatha who is always trying to marry him off because she feels he is simply too lazy.
“It is young men like you, Bertie, who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair,” she says at one point. “Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in idle selfishness a life which might have been made useful, helpful and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone. Bertie, it is imperative that you marry!”
The tongue-in-cheek and sarcastic humor in this book was exactly what I needed right now. Honestly, it is a type of humor that I feel like I am going to need consistently from now on. Because the chapters are short stories all their own it makes it easy to read a chapter here or there, put it down for a bit, and then pick it back up and still know what is going on
I love how Jeeves not only always solves the problems that Bertie has but how he also gets away with lowkey (and sometimes not so lowkey) insulting Bertie throughout.
Speaking to a valet who was going to fill in for him when he was on vacation, Jeeves says of Bertie, “You will find Mr. Wooster an exceedingly pleasant and amiable young gentleman but not intelligent. By no means intelligent. Mentally he is negligible — quite negligible.”
Bertie is, of course, offended.
“I suppose, strictly speaking, I ought to have charged in and ticked the blighter off properly in no uncertain voice. But I doubt whether it’s humanly possible to tick Jeeves off. Personally, I didn’t even have a dash at it. I merely called for my hat and stick in a marked manner and legged it. But the memory rankled, if you know what I mean. We Woosters do not lightly forget. At least, we do somethings — appointments and people’s birthdays, and letters to post and all that, but not an absolute bally insult like the above. I brooded like the dickens.”
Insults or not, Jeeves is always there for Bertie, especially when he thinks Bertie is wearing the wrong outfit or the wrong piece of clothing for specific outfits.
“The cummerbund?” I said in a careless, debonair way, passing it off. “Oh, rather!”
“I should not advise it, sir, really I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“The effect, sir, is loud in the extreme.”
I tackled the blighter squarely. I mean to say, nobody knows better than I do that Jeeves is a master mind and all that, but dash it, a fellow must call his soul his own. You can’t be a serf to your valet. Besides, I was feeling pretty low and the cummerbund was the only thing which could cheer me up.
“You know, the trouble with you, Jeeves,” I said. “is that you’re too — what’s the word I want? Too bally insular. You can’t realise that you aren’t in Piccadilly all the time. In a place like this a bit of colour and touch of the poetic is expected of you. Why, I’ve just seen a fellow downstairs in a morning suit of yellow velvet.”
“Nevertheless, sir —”
“Jeeves,” I said firmly, “my mind is made up. I am feeling a little low spirited and need cheering. Besides, what’s wrong with it? This cummerbund seems to me to be called for. I consider that it has a rather Spanish effect. A touch of the hidalgo. Sort of Vicente y Blasco What’s-his-name stuff. The jolly old hidalgo off to the bull fight.”
“Very good, sir,” said Jeeves coldly.
Oh gosh, I love their banter and how Bertie calls everyone “the blighter.” I now go around saying this to myself when thinking about certain people in my life.
I love Bertie’s struggle to be a proper English gentleman while also trying to have fun and rebel against the upper crust he is a part of. There is a lot of satirical commentary and digs on the rich of England in these stories.
I have been told there was a television show in the 1990s based on the stories, starring Hugh Laurie, but I’m not ready to watch it yet. I prefer to hold on to the versions of Bertie and Jeeves I have formed in my imagination for now.
As I mentioned earlier, I am currently reading Carry On, Jeeves and plan to read more of the stories and books in the series in the future.
According to the web site Fantastic Fiction, there are 15 books in the series:
My Man Jeeves (1919) The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) Carry on, Jeeves (1925) Very Good, Jeeves (1930) Thank You, Jeeves (1934) Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) The Code of the Woosters (1938) Joy in the Morning (1946) aka Jeeves in the Morning The Mating Season (1949) Ring for Jeeves (1953) aka The Return of Jeeves Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (1954) Jeeves in the Offing (1960) aka How Right You Are, Jeeves Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1963) Much Obliged, Jeeves (1971) aka Jeeves and the Tie That Binds Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen (1974) aka The Cat-Nappers
Have you ever read this book or any of the Jeeves books? How about any of Wodehouse’s other books?
Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.
You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
I meant to add these highlights from the July A Good Book and A Cup of Tea link party when I posted the new link-up last week, but it slipped my mind, so I am sharing a separate post today. I’ll get better at this as the link-up goes on!
This summer I am watching Angela Lansbury movies for the Summer of Angela.
This week I watched The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), which I had never seen before. I’ve also never read the book that it is based on.
I had to sit and process this one for a bit and also watch a comedy or two afterward.
Wow, what a creepy, dark, and unsettling film.
Yes, unsettling is the perfect word for this movie and while I am glad to see the second film that Angela received an Oscar nomination for, I don’t plan to watch it again.
I shuddered too many times while watching it.
First, a quick description of the movie for those who are not familiar with it.
From TCM.com, this one-sentence description tells us what we need to know about the movie:
“A man remains young and handsome while his portrait shows the ravages of age and sin.”
The movie is based on the book of the same name by Oscar Wilde, written in 1898. There is even a moment where the main character quotes Wilde.
The movie stars Angela, Hurd Hatfield, George Sanders, Donna Reed, and Peter Lawford.
Dorian Gray is a young man without any family who gets mixed up with a man who is a bit of a chauvinist, cynical jerk. This man, Lord Henry Wotton (George Sanders, who plays villains absolutely perfectly), comments on how awful it is to age when he is looking at a painting of Dorian being made by artist Basil Hallward.
Lord Henry, a man who enjoys manipulating the lives of others and talking down to women and everyone around him, says that youth is fleeting and that the pursuit of desire should be the only real goal in life. Dorian, who seems super impressionable to me, thinks about what Lord Henry has said and says that he would give his soul if the painting would grow old while he remained forever young.
Lord Henry tells him to be careful about making such a wish in front of his Egyptian statue of a cat.
Dorian decides to explore new places, experience new things, and later he visits a bar where he watches a beautiful young woman names Sibyl Vane (Angela) performing a song called Little Yellow Bird. He is enamored with her and her with him.
Consider yourself warned that the song she sings, Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird, is an earworm. I’ve been humming the thing all week!
He’s in love, but Lord Henry is cynical and mean and tells Dorian to give Sibyl a challenge. Invite her to stay overnight, and depending on what she decides, Dorian will know if she is virtuous or not.
Things will go downhill for Dorian after the outcome of the challenge. Tragedy strikes, causing him to become hardened to the world. He decides that living only for his own pleasure, no matter who it hurts, is the way to go in life.
I won’t spoil the whole movie in case you haven’t watched the movie or read the book, but want to. I will say: be prepared to be fairly depressed by the end.
I will say that two additional characters were added to this movie that were not in the book — a woman named Gladys (Donna Reed) who has loved Dorian since she was a child, and her boyfriend David Stone (Peter Lawford). Gladys was terribly annoying and stupid to me. They should have left her and David out, quite frankly.
The part of Dorian Gray is played by Hurd Hatfield.
His absolutely creepy and dead-behind-the-eyes expression is the central reason I felt unsettled by the movie.
I saw his demeanor as perfect for this part but one critic I read said it resulted in his character feeling too one-dimensional and detached.
“On all accounts, (director Alfred) Lewin micromanaged Hatfield’s every gesture (to the point of not letting the actor perform after four o’clock in the afternoon, for fear fatigue would show), resulting in a central performance that is appropriately strange, but which never engages,” wrote Richard Harlin Smith on TCM.com. “One doesn’t see what others see in this Dorian Gray, who seems as inflexible as a mortician’s wax even in his mysteriously protracted youth.”
I thought not emotionally engaging with anyone is the point of a character who essentially gives up his soul, feelings, and love for anything, to be as nasty as he wants to be (yes, a bit of a spoiler there).
The movie was only Hatfield’s second film (his first being Dragonseed from 1944).
Smith wrote in his review of the film on TCM that, “Hurd Hatfield, in his second screen appearance, was so effectively evil in the title role that it actually handicapped his career with casting directors.”
According to Hurd Hatfield Luv on Tumbler, Angela once said that Lewin would stop rolling the cameras once Hatfield made an obvious expression on his face. This was frustrating to Hurd because his usual acting style was animated and he wanted to perform the character like he was written in the novel.
Lewin’s wishes always overrode the wishes of the actors, though.
“Also to point out, halfway through the film Dorian said he wanted to be in control of his emotions and refrain from yielding to them,” the author of the Tumbler site wrote. They continued: “Here’s another possible reason on why Lewin wanted Hatfield to act with little feeling in this film. Now this is actually my conjecture, but it makes sense with my research. As many would understand, making strong facial expressions would wrinkle the face. Smile lines and crows’ feet form when happy. Forehead creases when worrying. Eyebrows close in and skin folds in between when angry. Bursting up in tears crying gives out the most unflattering face of all. To put it short, it’s impossible to look extraordinarily “beautiful” without scrunching the face.”
Ronald Bergen wrote in The Guardian that he interviewed Hatfield on time about his role in the film The Diary of a Chambermaid and the actor said he was glad to speak about something other than Dorian Gray.
Hatfield called the role both a blessing and a curse.
“A blessing in that it gave him a reputation; a curse in that he found it difficult to escape,” Bergen wrote.
After the movie, he was cast mainly as handsome, narcissistic young men.
Hatfield was ambivalent about having played Dorian Gray, according to the magazine Films in Review, feeling that it had typecast him. “You know, I was never a great beauty in Gray…and I never understood why I got the part and have spent my career regretting it.”
The casting director for The Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Alton, referred Angela to the casting director for Gaslight. He saw her in the role of Sibyl, but also felt she might work for the maid in Gaslight. That role as the maid led to her first Oscar nomination.
Angela’s role as Sibyl was her second Oscar nomination and came only a year after the first.
“Great send off,” she joked in an interview with the Screen Actors Guild Foundation. “Everything went down hill from there.”
By the time Angela worked on The Picture of Dorian Gray she had filmed Gaslight and National Velvet and had started to become used to working on a set. And she meant “working.” She said in the SAG Foundation interview that she was very conscientious as a young person. She was conscientious of how she needed to be professional for the sake of the other actors and the film overall.
This was both a good and a bad thing.
“I never had any fun. I never goofed off,” she said. “I missed a lot of fun along the way but perhaps in the end it contributed to me to being able to build such a very strong base for what would was to later become an enormously successful career.”
Facts and Triva about the movie:
Lansbury’s mother appears in the movie as “The Duchess” in the dinner scene at “Lady Agatha’s”. (source Jay’s Classic Movie Blog)
The hideous portrait of Dorian shown later in the movie was painted by Ivan Le Lorraine Albright. According to TCM.com, he was hired after director Lewin saw a painting of his at the Art Institute of Chicago entitled That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do. It is not owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.
A scene in the movie staged beneath a wildly swinging chain lamp was an effect that would be duplicated by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho some fifteen years later.
Several years after this movie premiered, a friend of Hurd Hatfield’s bought the Henrique Medina painting of young Dorian Gray that was used in this movie at an MGM auction, and gave it to Hatfield. On March 21, 2015, the portrait was put up for auction at Christie’s in New York City (from the Collection of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth) with a pre-auction estimate of between five thousand and eight thousand dollars. It sold for one hundred forty-nine thousand dollars. (source IMdB)
Oscar Wilde’s Dorian was blond-haired, blue-eyed, and highly emotional, but Writer and Director Albert Lewin’s conception of Dorian was of an icy, distant character.
The dark musical piece that is heard repeatedly is Frédéric Chopin’s “Prelude in D Minor”, the last of the twenty-four pieces of “Opus 28”. (Source IMdB)
Writer and Director Albert Lewin was obsessed with retakes. In this movie, he asked for one hundred and ten retakes and ended up using only one. (Source IMdB)
Basil Rathbone campaigned in vain for the part of Lord Henry Wotton and believed that his typecasting as Sherlock Holmes was the reason he failed to get it. MGM’s loaning of Rathbone to Universal Pictures to play Holmes was very profitable for the studio, another reason for not casting him. (Source IMdB)
According to Angela, a friend of hers, Michael Dyne, was considered for the role of Dorian Gray. Dyne suggested Lansbury for the role of Sibyl Vane. The casting director liked her for the part and suggested her to George Cukor for Gaslight (1944). She saw Cukor and Writer and Director Albert Lewin the same day and was cast for her first two movies. (source IMdb)
My overall view of the movie:
This movie creeped me out immensely and made me very sad. It was extremely thought-provoking. As I mentioned above, the movie left me with a very unsettled feeling. I didn’t really want to keep going at points but knew I had to find out how it ended.
The cinematography and the use of light and shadows was amazing. The best example of this is during a climatic turning point in the movie that involves a very dark action by Dorian. As the act is completed he stands with a light swinging back and forth above him and it’s casting light on his face, then it swings back and he’s in darkness. The shadows around and behind him move in the pattern of a monster’s mouth, as if signaling he’s been officially swallowed by and turned into a monster.
Another shocking part of this movie is the use of color. Yes, the movie was filmed and presented in black and white, but there are three scenes that are shown in brilliant, and later terrifying, technicolor. You have been warned because a couple of the images truly are terrifying.
I probably wouldn’t watch this movie again, but only because it disturbed me, not because it is a good movie. It is a good movie, and it is too good in presenting that icky, dark, and demoralizing feeling it’s meant to present.
Have you seen this movie? What did you think of it?
Cat from Cat’s Wire wrote about her views of it here and she does have spoilers, but it is such a good, interesting post. I loved it. If you’ve already seen the movie or read the book, definitely hop over to her blog.
Left on my Summer of Angela list for August are:
August 15 – A Life At Stake
August 22 – All Fall Down (keep an eye out. I might switch this one up.)
August 29 – Something for Everyone
If you want to read about some of the other movies I watched, you can find them here:
Here I am with another recap of an episode from The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries show from 1977.
As I’ve mentioned before, in the first season of this series, the episodes switched back and forth from Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew episodes and in the next season, they started to join together. Eventually, they began to phase out the Nancy episodes and focus more on The Hardy Boys. A new actress also started as Nancy when Pamela Sue Martin became disenchanted with the parts that were being written for her character.
*Disclaimer: These posts do spoil the entire episode. Also, I do joke around a lot about the cheesiness or plot holes or the “weird” 70s hairstyles, clothes or music, but please know it is all in good fun. I have fun watching these and the mysteries are often very interesting. Please don’t leave me comments enraged that I am making fun of your favorite show. *wink* I make fun of my favorite shows too!
In this episode, focused on Nancy Drew and titled, The Mystery of the Ghostwriter’s Cruise, we start out with people loading on to a cruise ship.
First, we see the ship with people waving from the decks and then we see a scrapbook with photos featuring an elderly man and the headline under the one photo reads: “Famous Mystery Writer John Addam to Set Sail.”
Underneath the photo there is a handwritten note which reads: “Castling to protect king — two moves to checkmate — this will be your last cruise, Mr. Addams. Your going to . . .” A hand begins writing and finishes the sentence by adding the word “die.”
I should note here that I copied that sentence verbatim from the threatening note in the journal (as you can see by the photo) and really wanted to go back and change “your” to “you’re.”
Imagine the editors not noticing that error before this episode aired. Or maybe they never noticed. Ha!
Immediately after this scene we see an elderly man and a young woman standing next to him and they are being interviewed by a TV reporter. The reporter asks the man, who we can see is Mr. Addams, the mystery writer we saw in the photos in the first scene, what made him decide to retire.
What she actually says is, “What finally decided you to do it?”
Um…huh? I don’t know about the writers of this show sometimes, but anyhow….
Mr. Addams answers that writing is getting boring now. “There isn’t a new twist anywhere.”
She asks him if this means there will never be another book featuring the main characters from his mystery books and he tells her she clearly hasn’t read his books because he killed off one character, retired the other one, and the third has simply gotten too old to do anything.
The camera pans to Nancy and her father, Carson, and friends George Fayne and Ned Nickerson. Ned is carrying all the luggage asking why the girls have so much if they are only going on the cruise for a week.
We switch quickly back to the interview and the author is mellowing a bit as he answers questions. He also refers to his niece Cathy as being his main helper with his books these days.
Nancy and the crew are now listening in the background and soon Mr. Addams ends the interview so he can meet up with them.
It isn’t clear why, but Nancy and George seem to be going on this cruise with Mr. Addams. At first, I thought maybe he is an uncle to one of them but that’s never really made clear, so I believe he is simply a friend of Carson’s.
This is one of the first times I’ve seen Nancy act like she and Ned might be more than friends. As they are saying goodbye Ned expresses concern that she will get herself in trouble and she says she doesn’t plan to and then assures him she will be safe on the cruise, leans up, and gives him a quick peck on the mouth.
Oh. Um. Well then.
Carson tells Mr. Addams to take care of the girls and Mr. Addams answers, “I’ll certainly do that.”
This whole time there is a man with either an amused or creepy smile on his face, we aren’t sure which, watching both the interview and the gathering of Mr. Addams and Nancy and her friends and Dad.
This will start an interesting episode-long tactic of making the viewers question who is suspicious and who isn’t, by the camera focusing on a person frowning, smiling, glaring, or simply looking, well, suspicious while watching Mr. Addams and the girls. This is done a number of times making us guess who was behind the eventual threats against Mr. Addams.
Let’s get back to the story, though.
On their way to find their rooms, the party is stopped by the captain. He tells Mr. Addams what a pleasure it is to have him on board and invites them all to dine with him at his table that night.
After that praise fest it’s on to their rooms but not before we have the suspenseful music and a pause by the captain with him watching the group walk away. Huh…is he also suspicious? And then there is a young woman watching them too. Is she suspicious or just a fan?
They were really dropping the red herrings left and right from the start in this one.
After the captain, the group run into George the activities director. He’s excited to meet George since his name is also George. George and George. Ha. Ha. He clearly thinks George is cute and lets her know he can’t wait to see her later during the cruise. He creepily touches her face, trailing his finger down her cheek, and says “There’s a hidden depth to you….”
Her expression cracks me up. It is a mix of flattered and horrified — pretty much how most viewers probably feel watching that moment. *snort laugh*
Once they finally get to the room there is a man waiting for them and he is not welcoming. He is the man who we saw at the beginning of the episode watching the interview and he says his name is Peter Howard. He has a tape recorder and starts smooth talking Mr. Addams, telling him he wants an interview with him about the memoir he’s planning to write. Mr. Addams says he isn’t going to be writing a memoir and tells the man to get out.
George and Cathy go to explore the ship, leaving Nancy and Mr. Addams in his cabin. Mr. Addams says he’s going to take a nap and settles back in a chair. Before he can fall asleep, though, Nancy finds the scrapbook with the threat written in it. She reads it to him and he sort of shrugs and says, “You don’t go through life like a battering ram without making some enemies.” He doesn’t like the idea someone may be after him but he also thinks it might be a prank so he decides to nap and Nancy decides to go meet up with George and Cathy.
Mr. Addams asks her to leave one light on in the cabin because he doesn’t like to wake up in pure darkness and when she goes to turn a lamp on, a huge spark flies out, knocking her down.
There is a fade out as the show goes to commercial break and when we “return” (there are no commercials where I watched this on a YouTube channel where someone uploaded all the episodes), George and Cathy are back and Nancy is sitting on the couch with a glass of water.
Everyone is concerned about Nancy and the captain steps in because he’s probably concerned about his ship’s reputation with the light in a celebrity’s cabin almost zapping the life out of someone. A ship electrician has arrived and says the lamp was definitely rewired to it would zap someone on purpose.
Mr. Addams points out how bad the situation is but how it could have been even worse if he had touched the lamp since he is an old man with a heart condition.
The electrician is a fan of Mr. Addam’s and lets him know how the fact someone targeted him is like a scene from one of his books. Wow. I bet Mr. Addams had no idea the attack was similar to one of his books. Good thing that electrician was there to tell him.
Viewers are left feeling that there is something not quite right about this electrician but can’t put their finger on it. He goes on the list of suspects too at this point.
As if we don’t have enough suspense, we will soon find out that the captain is worried about what could be deadly fog settling around the ship. He tells the crew to keep him abreast of the situation and then heads to dinner.
Throughout the episode we keep being shown a person in a long trench coat moving around the ship. We see them again as Nancy is on her way to dinner. They are cutting some wires and putting what looks like a bomb somewhere in the bottom of the ship. Eek. This episode is intense and I’m not kidding.
As in any Nancy Drew episode of the series, we have another moment where an older man seems to be flirting with her. This time she’s dancing with Mr. Howard who wants to know how well she knows Mr. Addams. What’s a little icky about this scene is that it’s like Nancy is flirting back with the man. He’s old enough to be her father! *gag sound*
“I’m not a stepping stone to him, you know, Mr. Howard,” she says coyly.
I’m sure that’s not how the writers meant it, though, really, so I’m just teasing.
Anyhow, they chat a bit about how she knows him and she says she knows his niece Cathy more, which is something I’m just learning about because for this whole episode I’m assuming Mr. Addams is friends with Carson.
Anyhow, Mr. Howard says he’ll get what he wants from Mr. Addams, mainly by intimidation. He’s smiling but…hmmm….is he the mystery note writer?
Nancy escapes Mr. Howard by bumping into the electrician or crew member, whose name is Tony by the way, and asking him for a dance before questioning him if there could be a stowaway on the ship. The man says there couldn’t be and the two continue to dance while Cathy looks on sadly. Her uncle encourages her to go out and dance but she simply looks sad and declines.
A girl named Adrienne approaches Cathy and Mr. Addams at their table and tells Cathy she went to school with her brother.
Cathy invites Adrienne to sit with them, and a chat ensues.
On the dance floor, the Georges are dancing together and the male George says the female George (yes, this does sound like the start of a joke…), “You know George, you’re very attractive.” And the female George responds, “You are too, George. In your own way.”
Ouch.
We flip to a scene with Mr. Addams out on the deck of the ship for a smoke. Suddenly a voice starts speaking over the loudspeaker, telling him that this is his last cruise, etc. The voice is echoing and s female voice. The voice taunts him in reminding him of what happened to his victims in his books. He is looking freaked out as the voice tells him he is going to die.
He runs into Nancy and asks her if she can hear the voice. She can and they start to look for the source of it and find a cassette recorder broadcasting through the loudspeaker.
Nancy points out that the recorder looks like the one Peter Howard had and suggests that he was hoping to sneak up behind Mr. Addams when Mr. Addams was looking for the source of the voice.
Cathy is out on deck next and says she heard the voice too.
“Whoever did it made a very big mistake,” Nancy says and stares at Cathy pointedly. Cathy stares back. Also pointedly. Dun-dun-duuuuuuuun.
Nancy and Mr. Addams rush to the captain’s office to play him the tape but when they hit play, the recording is gone.
Now they both feel stupid and leave with their heads hanging down. The captain watches them leave with a little smirk.
There are a lot of smirking people in this episode.
To speed this recap up a bit I’ll skip ahead a bit. After discussing that this all sounds a lot like a book Mr. Addams wrote called The Mystery of the Ghostwriter’s Cruise (gasp! The episode title!), Nancy goes to look for the book in the ship library because, yeah, sure, a ship is going to have an extensive library with just the book she needs. She can’t find it and we see the person with the gloves and the trench coat throw the book overboard.
Moving ahead again, Nancy bumps into Tony, literally, and he looks at her with “come hither eyes” and says, “I heard the captain say you think someone wired that lamp on purpose.” She says she does and he … yes, you guessed it…smirks.
“Who would do a thing like that?” he asks, suggesting she’s just some silly girl.
He tells her he will help all he can but to please be careful “in case there is some nut running around the ship.”
Are you the nut, Tony? Be honest now…you did think it was important to tell Mr. Addams you read all his books
Adrienne has somehow wiggled her way into the show and is now playing chess with Mr. Addams. She seems a bit miffed when the old man wins.
Nancy looks at the scrapbook with the threat in it again to see if she can figure out who might be making the threats and finds an article about a Martin Carroll who sued Mr. Addams for stealing his idea for a book.
When Nancy asks, Mr. Addams says Martin Carroll would be about 50 now. He also says he didn’t steal the man’s idea. They were working on the book together and Martin Carroll simply flaked out and walked away. There was also never enough evidence for the lawsuit to go forward.
Nancy begins to suspect that Martin Carroll is actually Peter Howard.
She somehow uses a CB radio to contact her dad and ask for more information about Martin Carroll. The captain is listening in and looks very concerned about her conversation.
Nancy soon gets a telegram for her dad telling her that Martin Carroll died six months earlier. He also tells her he will be meeting her on the first island the cruise ship is stopping at.
Nancy then finds someone leaving Mr. Addams room. She chases the person into the belly of the ship and is knocked off a metal ladder and is about to fall to her death when Tony shows up to rescue her.
Tony tells her she needs to be careful (he’s the new Ned, I guess) and then we are in the bridge and the captain sees on the monitors that they are about to hit a tidal wave. He wants the crew to tell the passengers what is going on without alarming them.
In between all this, George (the female one) is asked to sing by George (the male one). We listen to a subdued 70’s style song but they are interrupted by crew members telling everyone to get their lifejackets on.
Nancy smells a hoax though. She runs to tell the captain that she thinks the tidal wave is a hoax and that it isn’t going to hit. While she tries to convince him, we get cut away shots of Mr. Howard smirking while he drinks some kind of alcohol and Cathy looking creepy.
Turns out Nancy is right and someone has hacked the radar. But why?
Nancy has to find out.
She asks Tony if he knows anything about the Carroll case since he was such a huge fan of Mr. Addams. He says yes and that Martin Carroll did write one book and it was called The Mystery of the Haunted Cruise.
Nancy rushes to the ship library again and — it’s a miracle — the book is there! She reads the ending of the book and finds out that the character in the book is backed against a railing before being killed. She flips to the front of the book and sees a dedication that reads, “To my wife Celeste and my daughter …. ADRIENNE??!!!”
Nancy rushes out of the library and then we are sent to the deck where George and George are talking but that isn’t important — what is important is that Nancy runs out looking for Mr. Addams.
George tells her that he’s walking on deck with Adrienne.
“She’s the one who has been doing all this!” Nancy cries. “Get the captain right away.”
Suddenly we are on the deck where Adrienne shoves Mr. Addams toward the ship railing and declares he killed her father.
“He was a broken man, Mr. Addams in health and spirit,” Adrienne tells him. “I’ve lived under your shadow for years. Your name was all I ever heard in our house. My father was obsessed with you. You ruined his life. You robbed him of the success that might have changed his life.”
“And you wanted me to relive the events of that book?” Mr. Addams asks.
Adrienne says, “That’s right. Everything the way it was.”
Mr. Addams suggests that she couldn’t kill him, though, not really. Adrienne disagrees and is about to shove him over the railing when Nancy stops her at the same time the captain and his first mate are walking up to the scene.
“I don’t think she would have gone through with it,” Mr. Addams says, an optimist, despite being a grump through much of the episode.
All is well now, but Nancy and George decide they’re going to get off the ship on the island where Ned and Mr. Drew are meeting them.
Mr. Addams is going to finish his cruise, and he decides not to press charges against Adrienne, instead asking that she get mental help.
He even grants an interview with Mr. Howard.
And with that the episode is over.
As I said, this was one of the more intense and exciting ones.
Up next for a recap is Episode 13 of the series with The Hardy Boys and entitled The Secret of the Jade Kwan Yin.
If you want to read some of my recaps of other episodes of this show, you can find them by doing a search for Hardy Boys Nancy Drew in the search bar on the right sidebar.
Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.
You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
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